What NASA Can Learn from the Rescued Chilean Miners

The plight of the Chilean miners, trapped under the Atacama desert, was a bit like an astronaut on Mars: isolated, lacking resources and difficult. As psychologists interview the miners, they should pass their notes to the American space agency that helped rescue the workers. Their insights should have a valuable research payback for future space missions.

The recent rescue of the trapped miners in Chile was a triumph of both human will and technology. The miners themselves were the first to display great human will; they didn't give in to despair or turn on each other and, hoping against hope, they organized and disciplined themselves to survive. Once they were found, human will was on display all over the globe, as determination, advice and technology poured into the Atacama desert, much of it from America's space agency. That is a coincidence, because NASA has been studying that region for years as the closest analog to Mars on this planet.

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The coincidence doesn't end there. When it works right, "a triumph of human will and technology" is a fair description of both the NASA human spaceflight program, and the situation faced by the miners—isolated from the rest of the world for months with limited resources. Their situation may be analogous to that of NASA's future space-exploring astronauts. In fact, science fiction writers have anticipated similar situations for years. Arthur C. Clarke's acclaimed 1961 novel, A Fall of Moondust, depicted a situation very like that facing the miners, except on the moon (at that time, the depth of the dust on the surface was still unknown—the plot would be less plausible today), with a similar suspenseful and successful outcome.

There are two key differences between the experience of the miners and that of future deep-space explorers. First, what happened to the miners was when things went wrong. But even so, they had it a lot better than what will happen to astronauts when things go exactly as planned.

The miners had abundant water and, with the run of the entire mine below the cave-in, plenty of room to exercise, dispose of waste and get away from each other for privacy and quiet time. Once they were found, they received food, fresh air, and high-bandwidth real-time communications as well.

In contrast, consider Lockheed Martin's notional "Plymouth Rock" mission to an asteroid, in which three crewmembers would spend several months in a pair of Orion spacecraft, with a total habitable volume of just a few hundred cubic feet (even if one of the Orions is a "stretch" version). That's about the size of a small bedroom, including a toilet and galley.

They will presumably have standard-issue astrofood, like that used on the International Space Station (with extra hot sauce to compensate for the effects of weightlessness), no shower (sponge baths only), and communications with the rest of humanity will likely be low bandwidth (email, voice and pictures, but no video, at least most of the time), with a several-minute delay for most of the mission's duration, making real conversations difficult.

But here is the biggest difference. Once the miners were found, they could be supplied with material goods (as long as they were small enough in diameter to fit through the initial shaft). Astronauts on a deep-space mission will have no such supply source—what they leave with is what they'll have, and what they'll be able to have won't be much. For instance, they will likely have to recycle their urine, because they won't be able to afford the weight of a six-month water supply (unless perhaps it serves a dual use as radiation protection).

And remember, this is for a nominal mission. If things go wrong, they'll have to hope that, as on Apollo 13, there will be enough marginal supplies on board to improvise. If not, they'll die (as indeed those on Apollo 13 would have if the oxygen-tank explosion had occurred on the way back from the moon instead of on the way to it, when they no longer had the lunar module as a life-support backup).

Obviously, such long-duration missions in constrained circumstances will be stressful for their crews, and this is a situation with which NASA has little experience. The closest such experience is from the Soviet/Russian Mir space station program, particularly after the fire and collision in 1997, which occurred with NASA personnel on board. But even in those cases, they were only a couple hundred miles away and could be retrieved in an emergency. A deep-space mission with a crew is one with which NASA has no experience at all (one of the reasons that some think that the moon is still an appropriate first destination, being only three days away). So any data that can be gleaned from analogs will be useful.

Despite the huge difference in circumstances (volume, privacy, real-time communications, fresh food, gravity, etc.) NASA psychologists will no doubt want to interview the freed miners, to understand how they responded to events, correlate their responses with personality types, and add to their data base of such knowledge to figure out how to best plan and select crews for the much harsher conditions in which at least early space explorers will have to live. Presumably they will cooperate, to reciprocate all the help that the agency gave them. But even with such knowledge, such missions will likely await more cost-effective transportation, which will allow less spartan spaceships for exploration than a dual Orion (e.g., an inflatable module with over six times the volume). Long-duration group dynamics, in which changing personnel out is not an option, are hard enough without straining them further by unnecessarily harsh living conditions.